28 APR 2024 by ideonexus

 The Demise of Legality

In an essay called "The Twilight of Legality," John Gardner theorises the demise of legality in the modern age. He describes the increasing invasion of legislative regulations in every aspect of life. Think, the complicated and mistake-prone process of filling out your taxes, requirements to link government IDs to your bank account, or intellectual property rights and their muddy disputes. Gardner sees this barrage of legal paraphernalia as antithetical to democratic justice and freedom. He c...
Folksonomies: legality critical theory
Folksonomies: legality critical theory
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23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus

 Resistance Home

If you’ll allow me to stretch this metaphor, we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the stren...
Folksonomies: attention economy
Folksonomies: attention economy
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02 JUN 2015 by ideonexus

 Metaphor in Science

Metaphor in science, Boyd suggests, is a version of the everyday process in which a metaphor is pressed into service to fill gaps in a language’s vocabulary, like rabbit ears to refer to the antennas that used to sprout from the tops of television sets. Scientists constantly discover new entities that lack an English name, so they often tap a metaphor to supply the needed label: selection in evolution, kettle pond in geology, linkage in genetics, and so on. But they aren’t shackled by the...
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28 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 The Similies

OF COURSE we were hardly all the similes the Ariekei spoke. Some were animal or inanimate: there was a house in Embassytown out of which, many years before, the Hosts had taken all the furniture, then put it back, to allow some figure of speech. The split stone, made so they could speak the thought, it’s like the stone that was split and put together again. Most, though, were Terre men and women: there was something in us that facilitated. Many similes, of course, were uninterested in thei...
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The Ariekei can only speak in analogy, not lie, and not speculate. Because of this, they need people to serve as similies, references for their language.

01 SEP 2011 by ideonexus

 The Patient is a Besieged City

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
Folksonomies: medicine illness
Folksonomies: medicine illness
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A good metaphor from Alexander of Tralles.